A SONG IN HIS HEART

I am not an early riser...never have been, likely never will be. But these days I am forced into it.
Each morning at daybreak a bird in a tree outside the bedroom window breaks into song; no sparkling, whimsical tune is it either. No, this is more like three or four chirps in a row, repeated over and over and over.
Is this bird chirping for a mate? Perhaps signalling its hunger? Maybe it is simply chirping to make sure all the others of its kind have noticed they're burning daylight every minute more they stay in the nest.
Then there is one more possibility. Maybe the bird is just happy that it made it through the night, that it has another day to look forward to, that it is early enough to get a worm and that all about it the world is fine.
Not a bad attitude when you think about it.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE ONE

This time of year my mind wanders back to my high school graduation.
It was the sixties, the early sixties, and we scholars were getting ready to make our mark in a turbulent era, times that were somewhat like today in fact.
One of the key ingredients in a kids makeup at that age (at least in boys) is the notion that they are indestructible, that death comes to everybody else but that they will live on no matter what. I thought so too and some of my friends shared that belief as well.
One Friday night after a football game in our senior year three of us went out in a car and on a moonlit road with a steep hill at the beginning and a steeper one leading into a curve at the end, my friend cranked his fathers Buick up to forty or fifty miles an hour then turned the headlights off just for the fun of it.
What a rush!
How stupid is that?
We survived thus reinforcing our faulted logic that we would live on no matter what.
Some times that logic fails and when it does the result is too horrible to contemplate.

OKAY, JUST ONCE....

Look!
Up in the sky.
It's a bird.
It's a plane.
No, it's Superdelegate.
I'm sorry, it's just something I had to do.

AN OLD MESSAGE

I don't go to garage sales very often but my wife does. Sensing a need to restock our shelves with things other folks don't need, and we eventually won't either, she hit the circuit Saturday morning.
You can't be too early because the sellers won't let you in but you can't be too late either for then you miss out on the "good" stuff. She was there at the perfect moment.
She bought a small book that dealt with mostly good ideas about life and living and I don't suppose I could go wrong if I followed a few. But what intrigued me most about this book was the carefully written note on a blank page. The date was December, 1923, years before the Great Depression and WW II, decades of history ago.
It was a gentle note offering the book as a Christmas gift with the hope that the person getting it would enjoy it as much as the giver.
It was a refreshing bit of insight into a time long ago, into the thinking of someone now long gone, into what was really important in that era.
Eighty-five years from now will we find the same kinds of messages? Will we find books?